The beauty of beacons
What’s better than a successful search and rescue? Easy. A successful rescue.
Without all the delay, expense, difficulties and potential dangers of searching first.
It would be a fine thing to be able to say searches become passe´ in these days of personal locator beacons. We’re not there yet, but they are certainly becoming pleasingly less common now that the tiny wee devices allow for precise rescues.
Sure enough, the same day we report that locator beacons are becoming a routine art of the outdoor landscape comes a successful rescue of a father and daughter stranded by the flooded Glaisnock River amid forecastto-deteriorate conditions.
Excellent. And reminiscent, surely, of the rescue of a father and son in January last year, stranded on a small island in in the swollen tributary of the Hauroko Burn.
We’ve even had the slightly weird case this month of a broken-legged tramper saved in Mt Aspiring National Park by a locator beacon he didn’t have. Amid foul weather, an unidentified woman, not otherwise well prepared, had set hers off after becoming increasingly afraid on her own behalf and rescuers, answering that call, found the man, who by that stage had crawled his way back to the track.
It’s foolish to foray into the wilds without having a beacon with you – though it’s simultaneously true that the little beggars don’t then absolve you of your other grownup responsibilities. It’s also folly to place excessive reliance on them by failing to carry out the most basic preparations like having a plan, telling people what it is, and being clear about the rigours of the trip.
Though the trend is for even the more Crumpian types among us taking beacons with them, and the benefits have been assessed as more than 400 lives saved (and a good deal less pain and fear to be endured in the meantime) there’s still a necessary development yet to be completed to improve the way the beacons work.
As Southland Locator Beacons chairman John Munro says, the change from analogue to digital in 2009 carried benefits of reliability, but also meant that the ability to activate them remotely was lost.
Which is crazy, come those cases where the ACR beacons cannot physically be reached by the person in trouble.
Kudos, then, to the beacon trust, to an Otago-based engineer, and to the supportive agencies of the Community Trust of Southland and Venture Southland, for the development of a feature to restore this capability. It still has perhaps 18 months of commercial testing ahead of it, and is subject to patent office and ACR approval. But it’s a thoroughly good development in prospect.